The Democracy of the Constitution Author:Henry Cabot Lodge Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: than a century and which has been mysteriously lost during the past few years, is to be restored to us? It is proposed, to put it in a few words, to remove all t... more »he barriers which the makers of the instrument established in order to prevent rash, hasty, and passionate action and to secure deliberation, consideration, and due protection for the rights of minorities and of individuals. This is to be accomplished in two ways: by emasculating the representative system through the compulsory initiative and referendum and by breaking down the courts through the recall. These are the changes by which it is intended to revive popular government. Incidentally they strike at the very heart of the Constitution as the framers planned and made it, for they will convert the deliberate movement of the governmental machinery, by which its makers intended to secure to democracy both permanence and success, into an engine which starts at the touch of an electric button, which is as quick in response as a hair-trigger pistol and as rapid in operation as a self-cocking revolver. These new and precious ideas are of a ripe age; in fact they have passed many hundreds of years beyond the century fixed by Doctor Johnson for the establishment of a literary reputation at a point where it might be intelligently discussed. Let us therefore consider and criticise them. The compulsory initiative and the compulsory referendum need not detain us long, for the effect ofthose devices is obvious enough. The entire virtue or the entire vice — each of us may use the word he prefers— of these schemes rests in the word "compulsory." The initiative without compulsion is complete in the right of petition secured by the first of the first ten amendments to the Constitution, which really constituted a bill of rights. The ...« less